well, naturally, we are seeing why banks exist. Because people need a safe place to put their money.

Possible shorter version of events:

People left their money with some guy on the internet.

He promised them he wouldn't steal it.

But then he stole it.

But banks offer better protection for my money than can be afforded in a home settings. Quite the opposite with BitCoins. My TrueCrypt volume with keyfiles that I keep on my person and in a safebox with my BitCoins inside is far superior to... well... ANY internet-connected service.

Out of curiosity, what size do you set your TC volume to, and what size is your wallet.dat? Is the possibility of wallet.dat exceeding the size of backup.tc a problem?

I can't imagine anyone's wallet.dat being that large... Plus you can always create new TC volumes. My wallet is under 200K right now. Alternatively, especially for such a small file, plenty of other per-file encryption schemes would be just as applicable.

it's superior to how even major banks handle digital security too, from what I hear.

You have to trust someone (even if for a very short period of time) in order to make a transaction between bitcoins and legal tender.

but there's no reason to do it all at once. if you are trading 1 btc for money there should be an automated way to do the transfer in increasing steps, after each of which the other party would reply - so transfer 0.0001, 0.001, 0.01 etc. til you are done. You wouldn't lose much, and you could vary the rate depending on how much you trusted the other party.

But there's no reason to leave a quarter of a million dollars in BitCoins in an untrusted 3rd party's hands. Unless you're lazy or naive. It takes almost no effort to transfer them to your own wallet which can be trivially encrypted or stored on a device unconnected to the Internet.

Is trusting a third party with your BTC any different than trusting an online storage company with your data?

Yes, it is: assuming you use client side encryption, an online storage company never needs to know your secrets. It's the difference between a trusted and untrusted third party.

But you lose their data if someone takes over their server and deletes the data.

Most Bitcoin enthusiasts are speculators. These exchanges and online wallets are popular because they allow speculators to respond instantly to opportunities.